Vise and Shadow
Vise and Shadow
Essays on the Lyric Imagination,
Poetry, Art, and Culture
peter balakian
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
peter balakian
is the Donald M. and
Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and
professor of English at
Colgate University. He is
the author of seven books
of poems, most recently
Ziggurat and June-tree:
New and Selected Poems,
1974–2000. He is also the
author of The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America's
Response, a New York Times
best seller, and Black Dog
of Fate, a memoir. A new
collection of poetry, Ozone
Journal, is also available
from the University of
Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 8 was originally published in Art in America
(February 1996), 58-67. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings,
LLC.
“Sarajevo” by Peter Balakian from Ziggurat © 2010 by
The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-25416-6 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-25433-3 (paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-25447-0 (e-book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226254470.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Balakian, Peter, 1951– author.
Vise and shadow : essays on the lyric imagination,
poetry, art, and culture / Peter Balakian.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 978-0-226-25416-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn
978-0-226-25433-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-22625447-0 (e-book) 1. Poetry—History and criticism.
2. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. I. Title.
pn1136.b25 2015
809.1—dc23
2014038951
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso
z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
for Robert Jay Lifton
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
1
Poetry as Civilization: Primo Levi and Dante
at Auschwitz 1
2
The Poem as History 14
3
Ingesting Violence: The Poetry of Witness Problem 32
4
Theodore Roethke’s Lost Son and the Confessional Era 54
5
Hart Crane’s Broken Tower 74
6
Poet from Kars: Yeghishe Charents and Armenia’s
Modern Age 94
7
Collage and Its Discontents 120
8
Arshile Gorky: From the Armenian Genocide to the
Avant-Garde 146
9
The Anatolian Embrace: Greeks and Armenians in Elia Kazan’s
America, America 177
10
Siamanto’s Bloody News 202
11
Bob Dylan in Suburbia 216
12
Writing Horizontal: Notes Toward the Poem as Space 251
Acknowledgments 271
Notes 273
Illustrations
Plates (following page 100)
1
Robert Rauschenberg, Monk (1955)
2
Robert Rauschenberg, Black Market (1961)
3
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926–1936)
4
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1929–1942)
5
Arshile Gorky, Image in Khorkom (ca. 1934–1936)
6
Arshile Gorky, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in
My Life (1944)
Figures
1
Elia Kazan, still from America, America (1963) 186
2
Elia Kazan, still from America, America (1963) 187
Preface
I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary
and visual) imagination. Vise (noun): as in grabbing and holding
with pressure; as in seizing firmly; as in grasping and having a
grip on something; as in having a tight grasp on something, to
hold the interest and attention of an audience; to have a firm
grasp of and on that which is sought to be understood. Vise as
in something that creates something under pressure, as carbon
might be put under pressure to create a diamond. The pressure of
the vise-grip of the imagination can yield a unique kind of clarity and knowledge. The vise-grip of lyric language, for example,
gives the poem or visual work or song a value and a legacy as a
deep mine of knowledge and culture in which human thought
and emotion, language, and insight intersect and mingle, and
come together as distinctive, memorable aesthetic form.
And shadow (noun): the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective, as partial illumination and partial
darkness. Shadow as reflected image, but one that is partially
opaque. Shadow as verb: to trail secretly as an inseparable companion, as secret sharer, to play with Conrad’s trope; to shadow as
a force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light
on something—a person, an event, an object, a form in nature.
Poetry as aesthetic imagination shadows history, shadows hu-
xii
Preface
man experience, casts its own kind of illumination, often unromantic, sober, and shadow-like in its truths. Imagination as
shadow captures the aftermath of history, and when its shadowlight expands as a shadow expands on the ground in late day, the
light lessens but the insight deepens. In the shadow-imagination,
the poem can embody, among other realities, trauma. Various
forms and kinds of aesthetic memory can also witness the event
or its aftermath the same way the shadow of the historical event
brings to light—among other things—the relationship between
language and history, lyric imagination and memory, whether it
be personal memory, inherited memory or intellectual memory.
This gathering of essays written between 1988 and 2012 explores, among other things, some of the vise and shadow of poetry, painting, film, collage, memoir, and song lyrics. Some of the
essays began as public lectures, talks, or papers, and others were
first published in magazines and journals. All the published essays have been slightly revised and expanded, and those that began as lectures or papers also have been revised and expanded.
The map of my interests in these essays brings together poets,
writers, and artists from disparate cultural zones that move from
the Armenian Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire and Anatolia,
to Europe, and to the United States. I hope that the reader will
find the vise and shadow connections and contiguities between
figures as seemingly disparate as W. B. Yeats, Yeghishe Charents,
Hart Crane, Adrienne Rich, Primo Levi, Joan Didion, Theodore
Roethke, Elia Kazan, Robert Rauschenberg, Arshile Gorky, and
Bob Dylan.
1
Poetry as Civilization: Primo
Levi and Dante at Auschwitz
At a certain moment near the end of his time in the Lager in
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recovers, in memory, part of
Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. It is a moment that first comes as
a surprise, as he is talking with the Alsatian student Jean, the
Pikolo (messenger-clerk) of their Kommando. The Kommando
has just finished cleaning an underground petrol tank, and Levi
recalls that “the powder of the rust burnt under our eyelids and
coated our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.”
Levi has become friendly with the Pikolo, with whom he shares
an interest in books and language. Jean is an “exceptional Pikolo,”
Levi tells us—shrewd, physically strong, and also humane, never
neglecting the less privileged comrades of the Lager.
Jean also has an interest in things Italian and would like to
learn the language, and now the two of them find themselves in
a rare moment. It is a clear, warm June day, and Jean has helped
to arrange for Levi to accompany him, to be the assistant to the
“Essenholen,” the one who gets and transports the daily ration.
Although this means carrying a pot of more than a hundred
pounds on two poles, it is nevertheless a bit of a luxury amid the
other grueling chores of the Lager, and, most crucially, the two
2
Chapter 1
will have time together, and because Jean has found a longish detour for them, they will have a whole hour together. The prospect
of this small journey opens up Levi’s spirit in what is perhaps his
most exuberant moment in his time at Auschwitz: “One could
see the Carpathians covered in snow. I breathed the fresh air, I
felt unusually light-hearted.”
The hour is both a small reprieve and yet a moment under
pressure. They begin talking about their homes in Strasbourg
and Turin, about books they’ve read, about the similarities of
their mothers. An SS man passes on a bicycle and orders them:
“Halt,” “Attention,” “Take off your beret!” Surely they can’t fully
escape the reality of the Lager, but as they walk on, aware of how
precious their time is, Canto 26 rises up in Levi’s mind; it just
comes. The ellipses splice us there—where the poetry has risen to
the surface of consciousness after how many nights of pain and
mind-numbing brutality, after how much saturation in death.
There it is. “Who knows how or why,” Levi remarks, but there is
no time to speculate.
Why The Comedy, the Inferno? The relationship between one
hell and another is an obvious trope, but Levi takes on that challenge. He is also an educated Italian, a scientist by training, and
he knows his nation’s literature. Like any schoolboy, he knows his
Dante the way a British schoolboy would know his Chaucer or
Milton or Wordsworth. Levi reminds the reader, inadvertently,
that this passage of this poem has been in the basement of his
head for a long time, and the meanings of this short moment
in the Inferno are many. Who can say how carefully planned or
manipulated this chapter is, as all memoir must be, but it seems
beside the point as the authenticity of this hour in the Lager
bears the mark of experience.
Levi notices how attentive Jean is, and so Levi begins, as he
puts it, slowly and “accurately.” To engage poetry while trying to
stay alive at Auschwitz—Primo Levi never puts it that way, and
of course he doesn’t need to as the moment will speak for itself.
But still poetry rises to the surface in this strange and horrible
situation, and this young chemist—an Italian Jew deported from
Poetry as Civilization
Turin—allows us to see how a man can be helped in his effort to
stay alive by immersing himself, for just a short time, in a passage
from Dante.
Although Canto 26 also deals with the evil counselors of
Florence, who abused their talents for immoral purposes with
their glib tongues (hence they are burning on fiery tongues of
flame), the part of the canto that comes back to Levi is the story
of Ulysses and the Greek hero’s last voyage. In a moment, Levi
becomes the teacher, explaining the anatomy of the inferno and
its punishments and something about the poem’s structure—
how Virgil is reason, and Beatrice, theology. He is the hopeful
teacher on the first day of class—certain that Jean is intelligent
and “will understand.” And like any good teacher about to convey knowledge of something he or she loves, Levi feels “a curious
sensation of novelty.” As a force of vitality returns to Levi, who
has barely been allowed to be a man, he tells us now that he feels
“capable of so much.”
After months of deprivation, of near starvation, of living on a
crust of bread, lukewarm liquid called soup, of cold, of half-sleep
nights, of watching others die of disease or plain murder (“today
in our times, hell must be like this,” he says in an early chapter),
here is Dante’s language in his head, coming off his tongue. Not
only has it come back, but he is teaching this bit of poetry to his
friend Jean. It’s the moment in which Virgil speaks to Ulysses
(Dante’s way of bringing Virgil and Homer together). As Levi
recites the words, Jean is focused on him:
Then of that age-old fire the loftier horn
Began to mutter and move, as a wavering flame
Wrestles against the wind and is over-worn;
And like a speaking tongue vibrant to frame
Language, the tip of it flickering to and fro
Threw out a voice and answered: “When I came. . . .”
In the syntax and rhythm, in the drama of images, all of a sudden, here at Auschwitz, there is a bit of joy. A tongue coming out
of the flame: What could be more resonant? Surely the allegory
3
4
Chapter 1
has many echoes for Levi, a Jew at Auschwitz. But even more, it
seems, it’s the fondling of the nuances of Dante’s language that
stops time for him. And it’s not only recall and recitation, but
translating, which is another challenge; “poor Dante, and poor
French,” Levi remarks, but Jean is with him fully, and he likes the
“bizarre” simile of flame as tongue and even suggests the word
for “age-old,” as he too becomes a kind of collaborator in the
translating process. The moment here reminds us that the act of
translating is a deeper kind of reading, for in translating there is
a reliving of the poem, a kind of rebirth of the text through the
translator that involves a radical identification between translator and poet.
As they continue walking, Levi struggles to come up with
the lines, and frustration prods him on. He remembers “When
I came” and then is lost: “nothing, a hole in my memory.” And
then another line comes: “When Aeneas gave it that name.” And
then another hole, and another line: “nor piety to my old father,
not the wedded love that should have comforted Penelope. . . .”
A marvelous catch for Levi, this next tercet, but he doubts himself. “Is it correct?” he asks himself, and then slides forward a
couple of lines to something he is sure of: “so on the open sea I
set forth.” It’s a line that excites him, he likes his translation of it,
and his imagination starts to churn. It’s not “je me mis,” he tells
Jean, it’s more dramatic and risky, “more audacious,” he says, like
“throwing oneself to the other side of a barrier.” Levi is teaching
and translating at once, as the process begins to rejuvenate his
whole being.
The image of the sea now prods him in a Proustian way. The
“open sea” is something Jean, too, knows from personal experience—he, too, has been there. Levi luxuriates for a moment in
his own sense-memory as he considers how to explain this image
to his Alsatian friend. “It is when the horizon closes in on itself,
free, straight ahead and simple and there is nothing but the smell
of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far away.” As powerful as the
poetry is, Levi’s reverie takes him further. Here at Auschwitz,
what freedom to think of the open sea, “nothing but the smell
Poetry as Civilization
of the sea; sweet things, ferociously far away.” Were it said in any
other way, it might seem sentimental, but this moment of release for Ulysses in the canto becomes a moment of unexpected
revitalization and a momentary emancipation of spirit for the
prisoner at Auschwitz.
But then the world of the Lager breaks in, all of a sudden it
seems, for they have arrived at Kraftwerk, where a Kommando
is laying cable. He recognizes the Kommando engineer, also
named Levi, and as he sees the man’s head just jutting up above
the trench: “he waves to me, he is a brave man, I have never seen
his morale low, he never speaks of eating.” But Levi pushes away
from this jarring image of reality and returns to the poem, to
the phrase “open sea.” “Open sea, open sea”—it’s the rhyme he’s
looking for—the third line of the tercet. And, as rhyme always
performs that dialectical magic—pulling us forward in the poem
with a new word while simultaneously throwing us back to the
word with which it rhymes—Levi comes up with it: “and that
small band of comrades that had never left me.”
And then frustration again—as memory fails him, and he is
forced to paraphrase as he explains to Jean about Ulysses’s “foolhardy journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules.” A “sacrilege,” he
calls it, “to have to tell it in prose,” but at least he has rescued two
lines from the scene, and “they are worth stopping for.” Looking
at the cable-laying Kommando, with the stench of death of the
Lager in his nose, Levi rescues two more lines:
that none should prove so hardy
To venture the uncharted distances.
As some strange feeling of self-affirmation overtakes him, he says
to himself, “To venture” is the same as “I set forth,” the words he
had translated just a moment ago. The nuance of phrase engages
him, and he confesses: “I had to come to the Lager to realize that
it is the same expression as before: ‘I set forth.’” He says nothing
to Jean of this small revelation, and then sees the sun and realizes
it’s almost midday and that his hour is running out.
But his memory darts ahead a few lines, and he continues
5
6
Chapter 1
being the passionate teacher, teaching his last student at the end
of the world. “Open your ears and your mind,” he implores Jean,
“you have to understand, for my sake.”
Think of your breed: for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.
“For my sake”; the phrase is haunting. At Auschwitz such meaning is almost too much. Behind barbed wire, in a world that
undermines the basis of civilization, Levi holds on to lines of
poetry, to a sense of “knowledge and excellence.” “As if I also
was hearing it for the first time,” Levi exclaims, “like the blast of
a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I
am and where I am.” What more might one say about the transforming power of poetry? After six months at Auschwitz, such a
moment as this is possible.
There is something singular about this moment, something
different, perhaps, from other revelatory moments I can think
of in the history of literature. It is a moment of poetic epiphany
in which aesthetic and moral insight are fused in an instance of
deep reading in a situation of great duress. It is a moment that
almost takes us to a place “anterior to language” (the phrase is
Elaine Scarry’s), a place verging on the inexpressible, on overwhelming insight.
The exchange of energy grows in a kind of Buberian way between student and teacher, because the now faithful student is
more deeply aware of his teacher’s passion, even if he doesn’t
fully understand it, and the good and decent Jean begs his
teacher to repeat the lines, because, as Levi puts it, “he is aware
that it is doing me good.” For a moment, Levi suggests that this
little tercet is able to sum up their lives, despite what he calls
his “wan translation and pedestrian commentary.” He hopes that
Jean, too, feels the passage “has to do with him, that it has to do
with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to
do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles
for the soup on our shoulders.”
Poetry as Civilization
With the poles for the soup (that tepid broth of watery something that is sickening but essential for survival) on his shoulders, Levi is engrossed in the moment Ulysses speaks. “My little
speech made everyone so keen,” and he tells us that he tries in
vain to explain to Jean the nuances of “keen,” how many meanings it has; and certainly the idea that Ulysses’s words affected,
gave strength, inspired his men speaks to the force of language
here, too, at noon in the Lager. Though Levi can’t remember another four tercets, in his frustration he seamlessly folds in a bit
of the cosmopolitan life of language in the Lager: keine Ahnung,
Levi says, and Jean replies, Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de meme—
and then back to Dante as Levi comes up with the powerful
stanza about the sea.
. . . When at last hove up a mountain, grey
With distance, and so lofty and so steep
I never had seen the like on any day.
Once again, a small reverie overcomes Levi, and the seduction
of association now pulls him back to recollections of his home in
northern Italy. Those mountainous waves evoke real mountains.
“Oh Pikolo, Pikolo, say something, do not let me think of my
mountains, which used to show up against the dusk of evening
as I returned by train from Milan to Turin!” An image of the
beautiful verging on the sublime, as the mountains show themselves in the distance in the light of dusk. An image of home, an
exclamation mark after Turin; until now in his account of life at
Auschwitz, there has been no such memory of home—a memory naturally fraught with pain so that Levi exclaims, “enough,
one must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not
say.” In the soup line, the struggle of literary memory goes on,
and we can, having come this far in Survival in Auschwitz, appreciate what it means for Levi to say “I would give today’s soup
to know how to connect ‘than any I had seen’ to the last lines.
I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes.” To give up a day’s
soup at Auschwitz for a rhyme—what more could one say about
the pneumonic power of rhyme, about how sound and repeti-
7
8 Chapter 1
tion shoots through the mind to make connections? In frustration “I close my eyes, I bite my fingers . . . other verses dance in
my head,” he exclaims, and then, as they arrive at the kitchen,
with an acute sense that time is running out, he realizes it’s
only a tercet that he’s missed, and at last he comes up with that
last stanza.
And three times round she went in roaring smother
With all the waters, at the fourth the poop
Rose, and the prow went down, as pleased Another.
Almost frantic, he holds Jean back in the soup line because “it
is necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this ‘as
it pleased another’ before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be
dead.” Then he spills into a moment of uncharacteristic emotion,
as his sense of ultimate meaning has been sprung by the poem:
“I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still
more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a
flash of intuition, perhaps the reasons for our fate, for our being
here today. . . .”
What is Levi driving at? The Middle Ages? The human, the
necessary? Something gigantic, a flash of intuition? The reason
for our fate, for being at Auschwitz? Notwithstanding the power
of Canto 26, it is Dante rediscovered in this context that has
brought Levi to such a place of heightened feeling about art and
life. For Dante, the idea of divine power resides in the notion of
“pleased Another.” Has the tragic ending of the greatest of classical heroes brought Levi to understand Dante’s idea of God, of
human fate, of suffering? And, one is prodded to ask, given this
odd circumstance of Primo Levi and Dante at Auschwitz: Could
even Dante have imagined the Holocaust, the idea of genocide
in the modern era? Perhaps this is an implicit meaning of the vision of human behavior in the Inferno. Surely Levi believes this,
and this is why the Inferno is liberating for him in more ways
than one.
Poetry as Civilization
With his inimitable sense of irony, Levi cuts from the depth
of his consciousness to the soup line, among “the sordid, ragged,
crowd of soup carriers from other Kommandos.” As they are
pushed together in line to get their ration, the announcement
is made “Kraut und Ruben”: cabbages and turnips. He hears it in
three languages: “Choux et navets. Kaposzia es repak.” He’s back to
reality, and the paragraph ends.
But not the chapter. There is just one more line, the last line of
Canto 26: “and over our heads the hollow seas closed up.” From
cabbages and turnips to the death of Ulysses; perhaps it is not
so disjunctive; perhaps it brings everything together. An image
of death, and the death of the greatest classical hero, punished
for his deceit and hubris. A chilling image; death by water, and a
death that Dante invented for Ulysses, in a Christological revision of Homer. Dante’s invention of such a death for Ulysses,
his placing him in such a low circle of Hell, is punishment for
Ulysses’s deceit and hubris and perhaps for his perverse use of
reason, the very cunning that for Homer was a virtue. But the
image of drowning has special meaning at Auschwitz. As Levi
makes clear in another chapter, “The Drowned and the Saved,”
in which he explores the psychology of survival, those who lack
the necessary survival skills are doomed, in his essential metaphor, to drown.
In an earlier chapter, having had a brief moment of respite
in which he smelled the hay, felt the warm sun, and kissed the
earth, before he was jolted back to work by the Kapo, Levi notes:
“Alas for the dreamer the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not
often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only
tired beasts.” So it is here—Levi’s painful awakening is a drowning back into the life of cruelty, and if one can allow for the vastly
different context, a kind of Prufrockian drowning as well—the
drowning back into the world of our daily existence (“till human
voices wake us and we drown”)—in which the soul enlightened
by poetry in this noon hour excursion drowns back into the aw-
9
10
Chapter 1
ful time of Auschwitz. The end of the canto has come. The soup
line presses in on him.
›››‹‹‹
The place of The Divine Comedy in Italian culture is as deep as
the place of any poem in any national history. Levi was educated
with the poem, and Dante was part of his intellectual coming of
age. From the time of the Risorgimento, Dante has been an “emblem of national unity,” an archetype of Italian identity, “la Bibbia di nostre gente.” Having grown up in Mussolini’s Italy, Levi
was educated as Dante was being appropriated by the Fascists as
national icon. Mussolini’s plan to erect the famous Danteum—a
complex that was to have been built in Rome in the 1930s—was
part of that cultural landscape. And some lines of Canto 26 are
so beloved of Italians that they were recited at the lighting of
the torch at the 2006 winter Olympics in Levi’s home city of
Turin: “You were not made to live like brutes / But to follow
virtue and knowledge.” Any culture would be grateful for what
such a poem would bring to its people and its civilization. Surely,
the United States would be a richer culture if “Song of Myself,”
or “Paterson,” or “The Bridge” were part of its popular collective
consciousness.
While Levi’s encounter with poetry at Auschwitz owes a good
deal to the place of The Divine Comedy in Italian culture, what
happens to Levi at Auschwitz shows us implicitly how the poem
travels from its place in culture to its place in human consciousness, where it becomes a force of imagination and language, and
in this particular moment, a force that helps the battered self
survive. Beyond the poem as cultural icon, Levi finds meaning,
sensual joy, and some kind of spiritual rejuvenation in his recovery of poetic language: image and allegory, rhetorical eloquence,
the rhyme and music of terza rima. The poem comes to him as
surprise and revelation, and the revelation ignites a moment of
clarity amid barbaric conditions.
Albert Camus, who had come face-to-face with Nazism in his
own way, working in the French resistance movement, wrote in
Poetry as Civilization
the aftermath of the war: “The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could say
just once: ‘This is clear,’ all would be saved.” Like millions of
others, Levi lived in the “vast irrational” of Nazism, and in one
unsuspecting circumstance inside Auschwitz, poetry came to
him. That visitation, with all its fragmentary frustrations, compelled him to teach, translate, and interpret Canto 26 in a way
that brought a moment of clarity, simple and complex—a moment that provided a counterforce to that vast irrational.
›››‹‹‹
Looking back four decades later, Levi reflected on his experience with Dante at Auschwitz for that half hour, that morning at
noon, in the Lager, with his friend Jean. If the reader of Survival
at Auschwitz left that scene wondering whether poetry could
have had such meaning then and there, whether Levi had exaggerated or romanticized that moment, Levi has one more thing
to say, in his most probing book, The Drowned and the Saved:
After forty years I am reading in Survival in Auschwitz the chapter
entitled “The Canto of Ulysses.” It is one of the few episodes whose
authenticity I have been able to verify (it is a reassuring operation:
after a span of time, as I said in the first chapter, one can doubt
one’s memory) because my interlocutor of that time, Jean Samuel,
is one the book’s few surviving characters. We remained friends, we
met several times, and his memories jibe with mine. . . . At that
time Dante did not interest him, I interested him by my naïve and
presumptuous effort to transmit Dante to him, by my language and
my confused scholastic reminiscences in the space of half an hour
with the soup poles on our shoulders. Well, where I wrote: “I would
give today’s soup to know how to join, I had ‘none whatever,’ to the
ending,” I had neither lied nor exaggerated. I really would have given
bread or soup, that is blood, to save from nothingness, those memories, which today with the support of printed paper I can refresh
whenever I wish and gratis, and which therefore seem of little value.
To give blood at Auschwitz strikes me as a triple negative. The
moment “save[d] from nothingness those memories.” For Levi,
11